NJABULO NDEBELE
It’s time to shed ‘blackness’
AS A young adult and well into my adulthood, I often felt uneasy about my place in the world. The descriptors “black” or “African” were mostly the cause of my anguish. They shaped who I thought I was and how I was to respond to my immediate surroundings and to distant worlds.
In 1994, when South Africa became a free and democratic country, I responded to a third descriptor: “citizen”. Twenty years later, I feel the urgency of a fourth: “human being”.
This last one had always been there. But sometimes I sensed uneasiness about it. It was too general.
It was more comfortable to be “black”. In the 1960s and 1970s, a period of assertive, activist selfaffirmation, “black” rang wonderfully in the company of “and beautiful”.
In the 1980s, the descriptors seemed to fall off the radar screen somewhat. The intensification of the struggle to overthrow apartheid and the brutal response of the increasingly cornered state seemed to focus less on identity than on getting done the job of bringing down a hated state.
Around that time another descriptor crept in: “comrade”. I struggled to connect emotionally with this one, although I admired intellectually and politically the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions that gave life to it.
All these descriptors now come across as markers in a long journey. If “black” and “African” were its beginning, then “citizen” and “human being” are its completion.
Reflecting on the historical significance of the African Writers Series, David Kaiza, a Ugandan writer and journalist, writes: “For my generation of
Am I a ‘black’? I once was, but no more. Am I an African? Yes, but with qualifications. Am I a human being? Yes!
writers, those born in the 1970s, the African Writers Series was classroom text. To know how to really write, we naturally turned to the American stylists. To know about human nature, we turned to the Russians and the Japanese. It was the order of things. Ngugi [wa Thiong’o] might teach you how to feel, from [Chinua] Achebe you learned how to integrate African ideas into your writing, and Okot p’Bitek taught you how to sound authentic. But you also needed to be wary of these subjects.”
I read Kaiza to be saying that the continuing dominance of the perception of Africa’s unease, appropriate to the times in which this theme was explored, might perpetuate the status of its people as perpetually modernising, always becoming something else. If Africans are always becoming, when will they ever be?
I suspect Kaiza’s concern about the continental African is similar to my concern about the South African “black”: admired in the time of struggle, sometimes the object of adoration, sometimes of sympathy — and then the target of charity for whom, even in his own free country, he still has to be affirmed through special policies designed to advance him.
An abandonment of the will to struggle, it is called affirmative action. Free people do not scream for affirmative ac- tion, they build civilisations.
The South African “black” conducts himself or herself as if history owes them something, now and into the future.
In this, the South African “black” desires to inherit the extractive state that will always reproduce him as a phenomenon.
If the South African “black” is to be in pursuit of “blackness” in perpetuity, when will he ever be free to be not black?
For the “black” is a fabrication, a figment of history, wherein the human that he once was vanished in sacked villages and broken families that still break; swallowed up by mines and factories and farms that still swallow; disappeared in books and films that were never about him.
The South African “black” as a figment of history became a distracter and a detractor from his human value.
Particularly in the last five out of 20 years, the South African “black” has been galloping downhill. Leading the gallop is a leader who fits the image of buffoonery that has underscored in history the contempt for the “black” by its opposite, the “white”.
The history of uneven power relations between master and slave has seen the emergence of a particular kind of buffoon. The buffoon is the intelligent “black” who masks his intelligence in the pretence of stu-
An abandonment of the will to struggle, it is called affirmative action. Free people do not scream for affirmative action, they build civilisations
pidity. But this buffoon is really no buffoon. He is a person who, by playing the fool, endures the inner pain of self-degradation in the business of arousing the amused superiority of those with absolute power over him.
Cowering outside, but simmering with rage and shame inside, he survives another day. In South Africa, it has taken at least 200 years to produce and nurture him.
One of them has risen to the highest office of the land. He was judged by those who chose him to possess the best qualifications for the job: hundreds of criminal charges that have yet to be tested before a court of law, a history of moral indiscretion and an exuberant capacity to sing and dance and move crowds.
Once settled into the job, he proceeded to be who he always has been.
His greatest achievement thus far has been to build on his rural private property, with public funds, a palace. In its magnificence it glitters opulently in the manner of Ayi Kwei Armah’s Atlantic Caprice on top of a hill overlooking an urban sea of poverty in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
Following a public outcry, he then began to deny any knowledge of how the palace came to be. Such public denials of actions formally attributable to him in the structure of state governance have become a pattern of President Jacob Zuma’s leadership. What do we make of them? It must be that where there may once have been the inner pain of self-degradation, there is now an inner sense of entitlement.
The “black” buffoon, now in power, wants to own everything that once degraded him. But since he cannot admit to the desire for unbridled ownership, he resorts to what was once one of the sources of his pain: he deploys the lie — only now it is explained as a characteristic of his political resourcefulness.
This is the “black” at the highest moment of triumph: a politics absolved of ethics and morality. The laughter of in- credulity is one of its rewards.
It is time for South African “blacks” to no longer put store in “blackness”. To continue to do so is to insist on living in a liminal space in which dreams and effort have become disentangled almost permanently.
It is time that the South African “black” began to appreciate the value of aspiring towards the universal and then to live in it, to become a part of it, to add to it the cumulative value of the experience of being free in the specificity of their historical circumstances, where dream and effort are inseparable.
So, am I a “black”? I once was, but no more. Am I an “African”? Yes, but with qualifications. Beyond the typifying singularity of the colonised “African”, there is no place any more for that “African”. Am I a “comrade”? Definitively not. That kind of struggle that described “comrades” is long over. Am I a “citizen”? Yes, although my voice and my actions have yet to be strong enough to assert their formative constitutionality.
Am I a “human being”? Resoundingly, yes!
We make our contributions to ourselves and to the world at large by being who we are and striving to be the best that we can be, first to ourselves and then to others — not because we have proclaimed ourselves to them, but because they have voluntarily sought to emulate our example.
Humans aspire to the highest moral and ethical goals. And then, because they are human, they trip and fall and then rise and keep trying. They create institutions that help them to rise and try. For that reason, the most successful humans in history protect their institutions with rigorous intent because
Am I a ‘comrade’? Definitively not. That kind of struggle that described ’comrades‘ is long over
they create such institutions for the greatest common good, to protect themselves against themselves. In our pursuit of an inclusive state of society, institutions will give shape to our communal efforts.
Wherever we will be, at home or at school, or on the factory floor or in the office somewhere in the high-rise cityscape, or in the dark depths of the mine, or on the farms and in rolling rural landscapes, or in the township or city, or in the tavern or in the theatre, or on the catwalk or in a conference, we find our deepest value.
There are new urges to prompt me: to be a human being grateful to be a citizen of a continent and of a country that should never, ever give up their historic promise to themselves. Out of that communal commitment will come our new story to the world.
Ndebele is a research fellow at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town and fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. This is an edited extract of his keynote address to the 40th African Literature Association Conference at the University of the Witwatersrand this week